Dances With Witches

The late medieval and early modern world was never short on drama and violence, but few episodes conjure up as much fascination—or horror—as the witchcraft trials.  Picture a Europe of the 16th and 17th centuries, where long winters dragged on endlessly, crops frequently failed, and neighbors kept a wary eye on one another. Into this anxious mix came the belief that witches were not only real, but lurking behind every bad harvest, sick cow, spoiled milk or stubbed toe. 

If your bread didn’t rise or your butter refused to churn, it was entirely reasonable, in the popular imagination, to suspect the woman across the lane had been consorting with the Devil.  If your husband no longer loved you, he must be under a spell.  Courts across Germany, Switzerland, and France dutifully obliged, staging some of the most notorious witch hunts in history—often with tragic consequences.

Fast-forward across the Atlantic to colonial New England, and you’ll find a community every bit as excitable.  In 1692, the quiet village of Salem, Massachusetts, suddenly found itself center stage in what felt like a supernatural courtroom drama.  A cluster of young girls began twitching, shrieking, and blaming local townsfolk for afflicting them with unseen forces.  Ministers thundered, magistrates scribbled, and soon half the community was accused of flying through the night sky or signing Satan’s ledger in blood.  Salem’s brief but intense hysteria left an indelible mark on American history, providing fodder for plays, novels, and more than a few Halloween movies.  (Sadly, Practical Magic 2 with Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman is scheduled for release next fall.)

From the forests of Germany to the meetinghouses of New England, the story of the witch trials is a tale of fear, faith, religious zealotry, and the very human urge to explain the inexplicable.  Why people were so ready to see broomsticks and black cats at every corner is a mystery we’ll soon explore—one strange loaf at a time.

So, what sent otherwise sensible villagers into a frenzy of pointing fingers and shouting “Witch!”?  The usual suspects of politics, religion, lack of education, and old grudges certainly played their part, but there’s another, stranger candidate waiting in the wings: a humble grain of rye.  More specifically, what sometimes grew on that rye.

Ergot is a pesky little fungus that thrives in cool, damp fields.  It doesn’t look like much—just dark, shriveled kernels hiding in the harvest—but its effects can be spectacularly weird.  Baked into bread, it can make people twitch, convulse, and see things that aren’t there.  Imagine having a perfectly ordinary breakfast and then suddenly deciding your neighbor has a pet demon besides that ugly child that won’t stay off your lawn.  That was the kind of day ergot could deliver.

Some historians have pointed out that the timing is awfully suspicious.  The great waves of witch trials in Central Europe happened during the “Little Ice Age”—a long period of years of poor weather and soggy harvests.  Salem, too, had endured a string of damp summers just before its own outbreak.  In both cases, rye bread was a staple food, which means the fungus had every chance to sneak onto dinner tables.

Back in the day, folks didn’t know it by its modern, clinical name—ergot poisoning was more colorfully called St. Anthony’s Fire.  The title sounds saintly, but the experience was anything but divine.  Imagine nibbling on your daily rye bread and suddenly feeling as if your limbs were aflame, your fingers tingling like they’d fallen asleep, and your legs determined to dance the Charleston centuries before it was invented.  Some unlucky souls endured spasms and visions so vivid that heaven and hell seemed to be hosting a joint carnival right in their kitchens.  Others, in the grimmer cases, watched their toes or fingers blacken and drop away as if the Devil himself were claiming a tithe.  St. Anthony’s Fire was the ultimate party crasher: half delirium, half horror show, and fully guaranteed to set tongues wagging about witches, demons, and dark forces lurking in the rye.

While city leaders scratched their heads and hired musicians to “play it out” (possibly the worst prescription ever), later scholars suggested a fungal culprit.  If rye bread laced with ergot was on the menu, those convulsions and trancelike states start to look less like a supernatural dance plague and more like a very bad bake-off.  Add in a dash of mass hysteria, and you’ve got a medieval flash mob powered not by music, but by mold.

In Salem, the devil seemed to have a suspicious preference for housewives, widows, and spinsters.  While a few men did end up in the dock (poor Giles Corey got the worst of it, pressed to death under a pile of stones), most of the accusations landed squarely on women’s shoulders.  Why? Because Puritan culture already imagined women as more “temptable,” neighbors found quarrelsome widows easier to blame than landowning men, and the young (mostly female) accusers pictured witches in the form of cranky old ladies rather than cranky old farmers.  In short, witch-hunting followed the path of least resistance: accuse the people who were least likely to fight back, and who were most likely to fit the part.

Now, does this mean every cackling witch trial was really just a case of bad baking?  Not exactly.  Human fear, social tensions, and a taste for drama carried plenty of weight.  But it does raise the deliciously odd possibility that behind the bonnets, broomsticks, and burning stakes lurked something far more mundane: moldy bread.

So, perhaps, the great witch panics and curious outbreaks of old remind us of something bigger than broomsticks and bonfires..or ought to, anyway.  Communities in crisis often reach for the most obvious explanation, especially when fear is already in the air, and the result can be disastrous—or at least wildly misguided.  What looks like possession, a curse, or a devil’s dance may, with calmer eyes, be nothing more than bad luck, or bad harvests, (or…yes, bad bread).  The real cautionary tale isn’t just about moldy rye, but about how quickly people leap to blame the neighbor, the stranger, or the outsider when strange things happen. 

History’s lesson?  Before we kindle torches and rally the mob, it’s worth taking a breath—and maybe a second look at what’s really on the table.  The quick, popular fix is rarely correct.